Barclaycard closes UK call centre

Moves some work offshore

By Miya Knights

March 7, 2007

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Barclaycard has said it will close its Manchester customer contact centre and move some of the work offshore to India.

Some 630 jobs will go at the Manchester centre after plans to relocate it locally were abandoned. The work it handled will be shared between the card operator’s Teeside offices and those in Mumbai and Delhi.

A spokesperson for the bank denied the move was to save money, instead claiming it was part of an organisational restructure to streamline and standardise processes globally.

Lloyds TSB face criticisms of ‘outsourcing by proxy’ from its union in response to the back office processing centre closure it announced last month.

The bank also told staff it would offer every employee opportunities for redeployment. But only last week it said it was closing a Mumbai call centre for its PhoneBank customers as a result of the successful migration to an automated query handling service.